Monday, March 31, 2014

Staunton, March 31 – Moscow’s
denunciation of the accords it had with Ukraine on the naval base in Sevastopol
following Russia’s seizure of Crimea has attracted a great deal of attention,
but a Ukrainian response, one that creates serious problems for the Russian
military so far has not.

In response,
Vladimir Mukhin writes in today’s “Nezavsimaya gazeta,” “Ukraine has stopped
its military-technical cooperation with the Russian Federation.”While Russian officials are downplaying the
significance of this move and stressing that Moscow can work around it, Kyiv’s
decision at least in the short term harms the Russian armed forces (ng.ru/armies/2014-03-31/1_nuclear.html).

What is most intriguing, Mukhin
continues, is that the impact of this Ukrainian decision will be felt first in
Russia’s Strategic Nuclear Forces.

According to Vladimir Yevseyev, the
director of the Moscow Center for Social-Political Research, Russian dependence
on Ukraine in this sector and especially in supporting its RS-20B
inter-continental ballistic missiles is very clear, and it is these missiles
which give Russia a kind of parity with the United States.

While the Russian missiles are aging
– many were built in the 1980s – they could easily serve until 2019-2021 if
they continue to be served by the specialists of the Yuzhnoye complex in
Ukraine.If that support element
disappears, Russia will face a problem until it can find or develop a
replacement.

Yury Netkachev,
a retired lieutenant general, says that “the freezing of military cooperation [between
Russia and Ukraine] is in the first instance beneficial to the Americans,” who
he says have every interest in preventing Russia from relying on the RS-20B.
Indeed, he suggests, some in the West would be willing to see chaos in Ukraine
if that was the price of cutting off such support to Russia.

In Mukhkin’s words, “Kyiv has the
chance to put sticks in the wheels of the defense capacity of the Russian Federation
in other directions as well.”Igor
Frolov, a Russian specialist on the defense industry, says that Moscow relies
on Ukrainian-manufactured engines for some of its ships and helicopters.

Russia, “of course,” the “Nezavisimaya
gazeta” writer continues, “will be able to resolve theproblems connected with its dependence on the
Ukrainian military-industrial comple but for this it will need time,” perhaps
several years. And consequently, some Russian military and military industry
officials are hoping Moscow and Kyiv can agree to restart cooperation.

Staunton, March 31 – Russia’s
Anschluss of Crimea and Moscow’s various declarations about the right of
nations – or at least some of them – to self-determination continue to echo
through the Russian Federation, most recently among the Russian Germans who
viewing the Crimean events want rehabilitation and the possible restoration of
their republic.

On Friday, the International Union
of German Culture and the German Youth Organization met in Moscow to discuss
the implications of Moscow’s policies in Crimea for themselves.Heinrich Marten, president of the Federation
of the National Cultural Autonomies of the Russian Germans, made this link
clear.

He said that Vladimir Putin’s
decision to talk about the rehabilitation of the Crimean Tatars “means that the
state has again returned to the problem of rehabilitation” more generally,
including among the Russian Germans whose “wounds have not yet healed.” For them too, “rehabilitation is not a closed
issue” (nazaccent.ru/content/11143-glyadya-na-krymskih-tatar-rossijskie-nemcy.html).

Over the last two weeks, Russian
Germans have been working on a package of documents concerning this issue and
have formed a working group consisting of the leaders of the national cultural
autonomies, experts in state administration, historians, political scientists
and sociologists.

This group has had “more than 15
meetings and discussions” with senior officials in the Presidential
Administration, the Council of the Federation, the regional development
ministry, and the foreign ministry. And as a result, there is now a draft
program “on the rehabilitation of Russian Germans.”

The document itself has sparked
discussion and dispute within the Russian German community with some
complaining that it does not insist on the restoration of a German Republic in
the Middle Volga but others saying that it is right to focus on German national
districts in Omsk, and the Altay, and still a third group calling for “extra-territorial’
autonomy.

The
Volga German Autonomous Republic existed between 1924 and 1941, when Stalin,
following Hitler’s invasion of the USSR disbanded it and exiled the 350,000
ethnic Germans there to Kazakhstan and Siberia. The Russian Germans were
rehabilitated in Khrushchev’s time, but their republic was never restored. Many
left to go to Germany.

Any German demand for the
restoration of the republic poses some serious problems for Moscow in addition
to those associated with restoring a people and its institutions to land now
occupied by someone else.On the one
hand, given the continuing centrality of World War II in Russian political
thinking, it is difficult to imagine how this could be done without offending
many Russian nationalists.

And on the other, given Putin’s
interest in dividing Europe and especially Germany from the United States, it
is almost equally difficult to imagine that the Kremlin leader would see as a
step that would win him additional support in Berlin something he would want to
reject in any public way.

That suggests
that the most likely outcome of this new upsurge in Russian German
activismin the wake of Crimea will be
greater Moscow support for that community but no move to allow them to restore
their republic.But the genie is out of
the bottle , yet another unintended and for Moscow unwelcome consequence of
what it has done in Ukraine.

Staunton, March 31 – Confronted with
Moscow’s seizure of Crimea and its demands for the federalization of Ukraine, the
Ukrainian foreign ministry has countered by calling for every republic within
the Russian Federation to hold a referendum about their future status and possible
independence.

Moscow has been pushing for the federalization
of Ukraine for two reasons. On the one hand, federalization of Ukraine, given
that predominantly ethnic Russian federal subjects would be adjacent to the
Russian Federation, would give Moscow permanent leverage on Kyiv and prevent
the integration of Ukrainian identity and the Ukrainian political system.

And on the other, the federalization
of Ukraine is something Moscow feels it can use and expect to get support for
both because it is a federation and because the United States not only is a
federal system but has often pressed others to adopt federal arrangements as a
means of sharing power with various groups and areas within a state.

But there are two problems with this
Russian position: the Russian Federation is a federation in name only. There is
no fiscal or legal federalism – Vladimir Putin has done everything he can to
eliminate even the beginnings of either after 1991. And consequently, its push
for “federalism for export” is suspect on its face.

And the other is that federal
systems are both rare and difficult to create, a reality many in the US have
been slow to recognize.At present, only
about one country in ten has a federal system even nominally, and those that do
have taken decades or longer to create the constitutional, legal and even more
societal supports for power sharing on a territorial basis.

Without that foundation, as the
Russian experience shows, every effort to build power locally looks to the
center like the first step toward secession, and every effort to build power in
the center looks to the periphery like another move toward return toward hyper-centralization,
thus creating a situation which is unstable by its very nature.

As a counter to this Russian push to
permanently injure their country by seizing part of it and making another part
a place for continued Russian interference, the Ukrainian foreign ministry has
called on the Russian Federation to live up to its own principles and even have
referenda in its non-Russian republics about the future (turkist.org/2014/03/rf-referendum.html).

Before instructing others, the
foreign ministry says, Russia should improve the situation in its own country with
respect to national minorities, many of whom are sadly without the rights in
fact that the Russian constitution specifies and that they as human communities
have every right to demand.

“Why shouldn’t Russia give real and
not declarative content to federalism” in its own country? the Ukrainian
foreign ministry asks.Moreover, it
continues, “why should [Russia] not conduct referenda about broad autonomy and
if necessary about independence in the national subjects of the federation?”

At a minimum, Kyiv says, Moscow
ought to think about giving languages other than Russian the status of state
languages, a step it has demanded of Ukraine and other countries but has not
been willing to take itself.

Given that and given the aggressive stance
of Moscow toward Ukraine more generally, it is obvious that “this aggressor is demanding
only one thing: the complete capitulation of Ukraine, its division, and the
destruction of Ukrainian statehood. Namely in that way and in no other” are
Russia’s demands evaluated in Ukraine.

Russia, of course, has a long
history of making demands on others that it is in no way ready to fulfill for
its own people.But even though the
Ukrainian counter-suggestion is not going to find support in Moscow or – one fears
– in the West, it does have the effect of highlighting the duplicity of the Kremlin
and the problems Moscow itself faces.

There are 21 non-Russian national
republics inside the borders of the Russian Federation. They are increasingly
non-Russian given Russian flight and non-Russian fertility rates. Many have all
the conditions necessary for independence, save having been made union
republics in Soviet times, the precondition the West decided was the limit of
self-determination in 1991.

Some in the Caucasus have already
taken up arms to press for independence, Chechnya being only the most dramatic
in that regard. Others like Tatarstan, which like Chechnya refused to sign the
Russian Federation treaty, have large groups within their populations who want
independence. And still others want at least a re-division of power and fiscal
arrangements in their favor.

Moreover – and this is especially
important now – many non-Russians in these republics are horrified and angry
about the increasingly xenophobic ideology of the Kremlin, an ideology that both
puts them at risk of attacks by Russian groups and leaves them as second-class
citizens in what has been their own country.

Indeed, at the present time, the suggestion of
the Ukrainian foreign ministry about what should happen in the Russian
Federation deserves the support of all those who favor freedom and a law-based
state; the demands of the Russian Federation in contrast are, given their
obvious motivation, unworthy of any discussion whatsoever.

Sunday, March 30, 2014

Staunton, March 30 – Ever since the
Russian invasion of Georgia in August 2008, South Osetian leaders have wanted
their republic to be annexed by the Russian Federation and combined with the
larger North Osetian Republic. But Moscow had been reluctant to take that step.

On the one hand, the Kremlin clearly
believed that any act of annexation would generate far more serious reaction
abroad than simply creating another “unrecognized” territory on the former
Soviet space.And on the other, Moscow
viewed the combination of the two Osetias as something that could trigger more
instability in the North Caucasus

But now in the wake of the Crimean
Anschluss, an act that many in the West appear to be on the way to accepting
and more sadly to legitimating and with suggestions that South Osetia could
enter the Russian Federation as a separate federal subject, Moscow’s
calculations may be changing.

Although Russian diplomats continue
to press Tbilisi to sign peace agreements with South Osetia and Abkhazia, a
step that would point to a continuation of the status quo (ng.ru/cis/2014-03-28/7_gruzia.html),
a leading Russian analyst of the North Caucasus is arguing that Moscow now has “no
alternative” to annexing South Osetia and nothing to fear if it does.

In an essay on APN.ru, Yana Amelina,
a senior specialist at the influential Russian Institute for Strategic Studies,
says that what she calls “the Crimean precedent” is making the issue of the
future status of the Republic of South Osetia “particularly significant” (apn.ru/publications/article31328.htm).

“After Crimea,” she writes, the
longstanding dream of many in South Osetia to become part of the Russian
Federation “may quite quickly become a reality.” Indeed, she says, Osetians
both south and north of the existing border of the Russian Federation say that
it is hard to imagine a better time for taking such a step.

At a March 19 conference on “The
Situation in Crimea and Ukraine. Prospects for Development and Search for a Way
Out” in North Caucasus, “all who touched on this theme” spoke in favor of
annexation, including the first president of the republic, a leading Osetin
historian and Amelina herself.

Mira Tskhovrebova, the deputy chairman of the South
Osetian parliament, created “a small sensation by declaring that ‘Crimea has
changed everything’ and ‘if this is a window of opportunity, it beyond doubt
must be used.’” If Moscow gives the go ahead, she continued, we can organize a
referendum for unification just like in Crimea.

The arguments for unification,
Amelina says, are well known: Such an action would allow the Osetins to
develop, it would provide greater security for them and for others in the
region, and it would allow Osetia to become “an advance post of Russia” in the
Caucasus as a whole.

According to Amelina, there are no
good arguments against unification, especially since concerns about “’ what
will the West say’ have lost their importance” for Russia. And
she insists, there are compelling reasons to move now so that the Osetins in the
south will have better socio-economic prospects.

Moreover,
she says, “the time of small states, which objectively do not have the
geopolitical, human, material, and moral resources needed for all-around
development is passing.” And it can pass “very quickly” if Russia recognizes
the need to make such “fateful choices.”